


A critical, pissed off, falling-out-of-love note, and why I decided to go ahead with this project anyway

by ginger_rude



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Essays, Mental Health Issues, Nonfiction, Other, Post-Monster (The Magicians), bury your gays, grrr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 20:39:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18535081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginger_rude/pseuds/ginger_rude
Summary: In which I rant about The Magicians for over 9000 pages, and am probably not done, still.Eventually, I plan to post some fic.Eventually.





	A critical, pissed off, falling-out-of-love note, and why I decided to go ahead with this project anyway

**Author's Note:**

> I'm cleaning this up as I go along. Eventually, I'll put in proper citations for the interviews I allude to. Still too hacked off at the moment to look them up and reread.
> 
> Edited to add:
> 
> This essay. This.
> 
> https://templemarker.dreamwidth.org/56440.html
> 
> Also, belatedly, but it's still going:
> 
> Some people in the fandom opened a sub donation page for the Trevor Project--an organization dedicated to crisis intervention and suicide prevention for young people--in Quentin's name. As of this update, they're closing in on $7000. As far as I know they can leave it open indefinitely.
> 
> https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/2047355

First of all, to state the obvious: that -fucking- finale. 

I’m pretty incandescent about how the whole thing was handled. Done with the canon show going forward now, I’m afraid. 

I was feeling pretty flattened, even let’s use the word triggered, by anything related to the damn show after the finale, and briefly trashed the writing I’d done thus far. The show, and what they did to the character of Quentin, felt poisoned, now. Still does. 

But I saw that I’m not alone in feeling this way, and that the most wounded part of the fanbase is still getting something out of the fic. Maybe now more than ever. 

I’m taking a perhaps unintentional meta lesson from the plant speech: well, yes. Sometimes, you can still love the -idea- of something, even after discovering how deeply fucked the actual thing is, and how shitty and unreliable and exploitive its creators are.

The “idea” is story, period. 

Story matters. And if you don’t like the script you’ve been handed;

if, no matter how convincingly the storytellers insist that they’re on your side, that this was written -for you-, you feel erased;

well, then plunder whatever parts are still valuable to you, and go make your own story.

*** 

I was excited to learn that they’d made a show out of these books I’d liked, shortly before S2 aired. Which was shortly after the 2016 election. I was also about to go in hospital at the time, as it happened. A physical operation; but altogether, during that period I wasn’t in a good mental space, to put it mildly. 

Well. A -particularly- not good mental space. My default space is somewhere between the ground floor and the third basement level. This was worse. Watching S1 on repeat during recovery was a form of comfort food. 

I went on to thoroughly enjoy the next two seasons. I bought the series pass, watched every week until it was done, and then mostly forgot about it until the following year.

This past season, though, post “Escape from the Happy Place,” I started to immerse myself more deeply in the fandom. Binge rewatched the whole series. Found the Physical Kids podcast, was looking forward to geeking out at a con, recommended the show to friends enthusiastically. Then, just recently, I started working on some fic, for the first time in about a decade. 

Escapist? Maybe. It’s likely a question of balance. I tend to hyperfocus, and this fandom’s not been an exception. But…for whatever combination of reasons, it was helping me with an important internal process. Some rusty boxes beginning to unlock for the first time in a long time. I felt…better.

On rewatch, it became clearer to me that the show’s hook for me wasn’t just “hey, a newer, queerer (ha) version of BTVS,* set in early adulthood.” It’s a particular throughline about depression that’s also present in the books. 

Depression takes many forms, and, depending on which experts you believe, has any number or combination of etiologies. "Broken brain" to be solved (or not) through better chemistry; not-good-enough parenting; socioeconomic oppression; insufficient can-do and roughage. 

In my experience, however, at the core of depression is existential crisis. At the end of the day, it's not so much even the self loathing; it's the experience of being alone in an indifferent universe. It's not just that terrible shit keeps happening, it's that none of it -means- anything. There are no rules to follow, or none that actually work. God is a self involved liar, your hero is a child molester, and your dream world is as fucked up as the reality you knew. May as well just yell at a plant. Or stick your arm in an arcade game full of sharp blades. Nothing matters. 

All of the characters in The Magicians, not just Quentin, are constantly searching for something bigger, something better. Most of the time, this search is rewarded with a spiral of suffering. Eliot's first tentative exploration of romantic vulnerability ends with him having to murder his possessed -by-evil "boyfriend." Julia puts her faith in a supposed benevolent goddess, and pays a particularly horrific price for it. Like Fillory, the show is extremely dark under all the whimsy, and every character goes through a world of shit, very much including Quentin. But in the words of a Sera Gamble interview—roughly paraphrasing here, not going to hunt it down at the moment—under all the layers of depression, there’s a tiny, beating heart of optimism within Quentin that’s truly beautiful.

Faith, in other words. Faith, in the face of every bleak hard reality in this world and any other. -Something- better is still possible. It's not about gods, or heroes, or magic, in the end. Perhaps the better word is "love." 

I slowly started to realize how much I cared for Quentin. He was the tiny, beating heart that held the ensemble together. He stopped believing in almost everything, but he never stopped caring about his friends. He was hope. He was love.

And then, they killed him. 

And called it beautiful.

Quentin got to see that he was, at the end of the day, truly, profoundly loved. Too late, however, to receive or give any more. No more words. No more touch. One last look.

And then all the lights went out, forever.

*

The meta irony of getting overinvolved with a piece of fiction, only to be profoundly disillusioned and even harmed by it: it is not lost on me. 

*

Certainly, it was -effective-. Reader, I ugly cried. Jason Ralph's performance is absolutely gutwrenching, probably his best in the entire series. It's bittersweet. It's cathartic. It's skillfully filmed. But what, exactly, was the point? Because what I'm getting is: "you sacrifice the integrity of your character, and the entire show, for twenty minutes' worth of tearjerking." 

I don’t imagine that that was the showrunners’ intended message: seriously, if you had any faith in us at all, don’t. Don’t trust hope. Don’t trust anything. Life is a never ending trauma conga line, and the only possible relief is in death. At best, you can pick up some cheap entertainment value along the way. 

But as John McNamara said in an interview, sometimes the [un]conscious speaks louder than your conscious intention. 

Certainly, Quentin's entire arc this past season is its only coherent throughline. Increasingly withdrawn, flat affect, indifferent to his own well being. He himself asks-heartbreakingly-whether he did something heroic or finally found a way to kill himself. Penny's answer is "the former," because look how deeply you are grieved. The unavoidable conclusion we're left with, though, is "at best, probably both at once."/p>

The “conscious” explanations in the postmortem interviews just add insult to injury. It’s Word of God (McNamara) possible that it was, in fact, parasuicide. Nonetheless, we are also to understand that Quentin's story has come to a natural and beautiful conclusion. Besides: the white male protagonist must die. This is, like, woke and postmodern and edgy and shit. 

I am not a white heterosexual man. I am, like Quentin, a queer, introverted supernerd who struggles with lifelong depression. Killing him off was not fucking empowering, not in the slightest. This was not some subversion of the patriarchy. This was not some radical decentering of a “traditional” protagonist for the sake of a more diverse ensemble. It was *already* an ensemble piece. Clearly. It’s one of the reasons I kept saying it was so much better than the books. 

This was not good storytelling, or a good closure for a character who had -many- potential stories left, had they had the creativity and bravery to pursue them. This was not even remotely original: plenty of shows have offed the nominal protagonist, even permanently. 

This was fuckery, is what this was, pure and simple. Done for the sake of milking the angst and shock value. And ratings, of course. Cruel, unnecessary, dishonest, manipulative, and at the end of the day, deeply reactionary. 

As per the final scene: it’s as shockingly original as “Our Town.” I love how all the choices for to not have -any- closure with Eliot, or anyone, really, are rationalized by the showrunners as the gritty reality of death. You don’t always get to say goodbye, no, that's true. You do, apparently, get to watch from beyond the grave, though. And then, you move on to a better place.

"There is peace in the afterlife" seems like a fucked up last beacon of hope from showrunners who seem otherwise determined to deconstruct every other last article of faith, not least in their own good intentions toward their most vulnerable viewers.

We close on five seconds' worth of a suicide hotline number. This chaser does not make the preceding package of treacle-coated bitterness any easier to swallow.

*

By the way, I absolutely saw they were planning to kill Quentin from several episodes off; the telegraphing was not subtle. I was prepared for it. Even decided they could potentially do some interesting storylines with it: hey, travel through the Underworld, it’s a classic Hero’s Journey arc they could totally subvert and still have him eventually get out. Great potential metaphor for going through the bottom and out re: depression. Could meet some old characters. Benedict. Dad. More interaction with P40. Rich environment to keep exploring. But: no. 

What I wasn’t prepared for was the permakill, the exploitation thereof for supposed edginess, and the complete lack of -any- sort of interaction with Eliot before the chop. But there it was. Suddenly, we’d gone from a pioneer of overt queer male love to the frigging Childrens’ Hour. SE Hinton, at best. Stay gold, Ponyboy. 

But worst of all:

The message to the suicidally depressed, queer and otherwise, is that it does not, in fact, get better.

Eliot’s words way back in the beginning of the series, are important here: while it’s [sometimes? often?] true that it doesn’t get better, -you are not alone here.-

There is some real existential comfort in that, even if the gods are nonexistent or cruel and magic doesn’t fix much and the fairy tale land is just another shitshow. The “something bigger” is simple human connection. Potentially, even, love.

So Quentin offers love in the form of selfless actions. That’s how he earns existential meaning. I -imagine- that, in the best possible spin, that that is what the showrunners intended. Consciously, that is.

But before truly getting to soak in how much his love is appreciated and returned,—which it -truly is-, by Alice, by Eliot, by all his friends— his story is at an end.

As is a real chance for Eliot to experience true love, per Appleman’s postmortem “Making Magic” interview. 

Sorry, man. It wasn’t your fault. You were put through the wringer by cruelly whimsical creators.

You deserved better.

Quentin deserved better.

We all deserve better.

**Author's Note:**

> And in fact, Buffy also deals very centrally with existential themes, and, I would say at this point, much better, warts and all. I'll have another essay about this up shortly.


End file.
